Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The King's Blood is the second volume in
Daniel Abraham's Epic Fantasy series, The
Dagger and the Coin.
As fans of Abraham's diverse bibliography have no doubt come to expect, this is
a novel filled with gripping characters and momentum, and it is a supremely
gripping Epic Fantasy novel. The flaws that it does have come as a result of
the series' size and scope, which can threaten to leave a single plotline's
potential unexplored or shoved aside.

In my review
of the first volume, The Dragon's Path, I said that it
"ended before its most interesting elements could come to the fore." Does
that still hold? Well, yes and no. Like A
Song of Ice and Fire, The Dagger and
the Coin has a series of political plots and struggles against a far larger
mythic background. Like (the
first three novels of) A Song of Ice and
Fire¸ that political plot charges forward, twisting and turning about, while
the larger arc contents itself with hints and crawls. The spread of the Spider
Goddess' priests is certainly an important event of the book, mind you. Their
growing presence inspires a fair bit of foreboding in forward thinking
characters and readers alike and the actions they inspire from others are certainly
dramatic. But that last part's the key. The priests are important so far
primarily in how other characters react to them, whether that reaction's
gullible (inevitable?) following or violent (doomed?) resistance. The priests
themselves, however, have yet to become central; the earthshaking threat that
they pose is still nothing more than vague whispering on the horizon.

That slowness
of pace might have, after two volumes, grown obnoxious if not for the gripping
nature and fast pace of the political plotline. Abraham uses short chapters and a
multiplicity of viewpoints to progress quickly through momentous events without short changing them. He is adept at showing less to imply far, far
more; by giving us the key scenes in a war, and making discussion of it play
into the chapters and lives of the characters not directly involved, Abraham is
able to get across the scale, importance, and impact of a massive conflict
without trudging through its every escalade. By using each point of view to
reinforce the others, Abraham is able to create a far wider tapestry than he
would be able to otherwise and to make every stroke far more convincing.

Furthermore,
Daniel Abraham is a master of making his characters likable. Now, mind you,
likable is very, very different from blandly good. This is not a cast without
depth or variation. But Abraham removes moral ease by a seemingly infinite
ability to show us what is most dear to the characters and feel it alongside
them. We may be horrified by what they do, but we understand why. When we are
in their heads, we know their joys and their terrors. Their most despicable
acts seem wholly justified, until we free ourselves from their perspective and
realize the horrors we have watched unleashed. The main example of this is no
doubt Geder, the noble propelled through the ranks by his allegiance with the
priests and surfeit of blind luck. Geder is prickly skin personified, but his small
wishes, his love of reading, and his desire to avoid humiliation humanize him.
His nigh limitless power then makes him terrifying. Always, Geder's perspective
dances on the razor's edge between endearing and sickening. No matter how much
the reader tries to disconnect from him and focus on his crimes, it tips back.

As in the
first book, Dawson is an unyielding conservative, a man who believes change is
always wrong and that order and etiquette are all that hold us back from the
abyss. He is the kind of man who will die before surrendering what he believes.
He comes to view the priests as an abomination polluting his beloved Antea, and
he will die to expunge them. He is an elitist, a man who
believes that: we [nobles] have been born
better (p. 274) and who says: When a
low man crosses me, I execute him. (ibid) Abraham's said that he based the character on the
German author of Diary of a Man in Despair, who hated the Nazi's lower class
origins. The idea of evil pitted against a greater evil is certainly a strong one,
and one that's been made to work innumerable times in the past, and Abraham imbues
Dawson with an incredible force of character and personality.

But while
Dawson faces incredible worldly challenges, he faces no real ideological ones. In
my review of The Dragon's Path, I
said that "Abraham seems to have left out the part where his reprehensible
character has equally reprehensible foes." Here, the problem is rather the
opposite. Outside of a very few utterances like the one I quoted above, Dawson's
prejudices are never put to the test or even brought to the fore. He never
interacts with characters of a lower class, never has to either disregard the
merit of an inferior man or overcome his beliefs. His idea of natural
superiority is, here, a background part of his character. Outside of a few such
observances, he could simply play the part of the purely loyal white knight;
he's a Ned Stark burdened with blemishes, but whose blemishes never come into
play.

Cithrin and
Marcus both begin the story struggling to keep control of the bank branch that
Cithrin established in The Dragon's Path.
By the book's end, both have wandered rather far afield, called from that local
struggle to larger things. For Cithrin, the change happens quickly. In order to
defeat the notary that's strangling her local bank, she goes to the headquarters
of the Medean bank, which leads to some of the novel's wittiest lines, such as
when she tells Komme Medea that his notary has the soul of a field mouse and the tact of a landslide. (p. 193) From
there, Cithrin finds herself involved in great happenings around the map,
including the turmoil in Antea.

The biting
dialogue is not the only successful part of her plotline. As in the seminal Long Price quartet, Abraham weaves
economics into a larger narrative to the great benefit of it all. Money, as
well as swords, presents a route to power in Abraham's world. Cithrin says of
her childhood dreams that: The dragon
turned out to be money. […] Coin and contract and lending at interest were what
let me fly. (p. 362) Of course, as Marcus' stint as a bank enforcer goes,
coin and blade are not wholly divorced; the former, in fact, might be as hollow
without the latter as the latter would be insignificant without the former.

Despite its
excellent use of money and the bank's structure, however, Cithrin's story
suffers from being divorced from the bank she worked so hard for in the prior
volume. Here, she ventures damn far afield, and it can be difficult at times to
relate each step on the way to her larger purpose. Immersed in the politics of
Camnipol in particular, the unique aspects of Cithrin's story are endangered by
the weight of the more intricately tied together narratives around it. The
threatening feeling of aimlessness is certainly not aided by her justification
of a major decision as a whim, a moment's
madness. (p. 285) Abraham is too gifted a writer of character to allow
things to totally devolve, but one coincidence in her storyline in particular
does verge on making the whole affair feel less like a plot than an
artificially guided wander.

Though he
stays put for most of it, Marcus Wester's plotline suffers worse than Cithrin's
for their splitting up. When she departs, his role as her protector is made
rather difficult, and he's more than aware of the problem. The solution seems
to be Master Kit, a character from the first novel and an apostate member of
the priesthood. Kit tries to enlist Marcus in a grand quest to defeat the
Goddess, and, though Marcus refuses at first, it's clear that he'll eventually
acquiesce. That certainty, and his continuing fixation with a plotline that
Cithrin has already moved past, serve to make most of his scenes until near the
end feel like treading water, no matter how enjoyable the small parts of each
of them might be. As for Master Kit, it does make the reader wonder than his
urgent quest, established in the prologue, had ample time to wait about in one
place until Marcus finally got around to changing his mind.

Much of the
criticism, my own no exception, of The
Dragon's Path seemed to center on its worldbuilding. The King's Blood does add a great deal to what we know, it does not
fill in every detail of its world in the way that some other fantasy novels (The Wheel of Time,The Way of Kings, etc) do. That being said, the nature of the
world, and of its impact, becomes far clearer here. Every character is driven
by the recent past, by the shape of the nations on the map and by the history
formed character of the men that inhabit them. As one character says, the nature of history defines us. (p.
204) But what is
known about history is not the entirety of it. The Dagger and the Coin is as driven by the limits of historical knowledge (p. 43) as it is by the history that
is known. Almost everyone knows that: Anything
could be buried below Camnipol, and no one would ever find it. It was a city of
lost things. (p. 337) This is the story of those lost things coming to the
surface, the causes and events buried beneath the causes and events that seem
to shape the characters and present world, and this deeper history threatens to
throw everything that built up after off its back as it rises.

As for the
magic system, we may not have gotten to understand all of its origins or
consequences yet, but what we do see of it is fascinating and filled with
unsettling promise. The priests' power lies on the barrier between the truth
and the lie. They can always tell when you are lying. And they can always make
you believe that they are telling the truth. The priests say that words are the armor and swords of souls, (p. 210) and their claim
seems true; with their power, they can remake any man they meet. This ties into
the line between being and being thought of, the difference between truth and
certainty, and the difference between pretending to be something and being it,
all of which are chief themes in much of Abraham's work (such as in the story
The Curandero and the Swede from Leviathan Wept).
As one character says, We are the stories
people tell about us. (p. 441)

Having
reached the end of its second volume, I can say that The Dagger and the Coin has so far still not awed me to the same
extent that The Long Price quartet
did. That being said, it is intriguing, fresh, fast, and fun, and its every
ominous motion is on a canvas that threatens to be torn through in the next few
pages. The Dagger and the Coin is so
far one of the most entertaining fantasies I've read in a while, and its next
volumes promise to be far better still.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Last week, Innsmouth Free Press published my review of Cameron Pierce's Cthulhu Comes to the Vampire Kingdom. In case you were wondering, the book is just as bizarre as the title makes it sound. You can read the review here.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Over the past week or two, I've had two rather nice pieces of news that I didn't get a chance to report.

First, there's my horror flash Painting Nothing, which was just accepted by The Gloaming for publication. Painting Nothing was written rather early compared to most of my other horror stories, and it's admittedly not as subtle and is a bit more blatant in its worship of Thomas Ligotti (I wrote it as I finished Teatro Grottesco for the first time). Still, I think it's a nice tale, and I hope you all enjoy it when it surfaces.

Then there's the matter of Legwork, which is a rather strange fantasy short I wrote some time ago when high on the inspiration energy of having just discovered Haruki Murakami and the short fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Fantastic Frontiers Magazine thought it worthy to be in their debut issue.

With these two sales, I have a total of four forthcoming stories, which is a rather unprecedented (but quite nice) experience. Oddly enough, the past months' onslaught of publications comes in a time when my output's been rather sluggish. Since the fall, I've only managed four stories (one of which sold to Beneath Ceaseless Skies), which is rather below last year's frenzied pace. Still, the summer should hopefully give me some time to get the numbers back up.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Released in
2011 by the author's Griffith Publishing, Blue
Fall is the opening to a series of books centered on the explosive and
barely containable world of the Tournament. I had issues with Griffith's pacing
and world building, but the action scenes at the book's center are damn good
and strong enough to keep the reader charging through the book's pages.

The
Tournament is at the novel's very core, and the characters' varying takes on it
are fascinating. To some, it's a sport, a World
Cup of team shooting (p. 297). A refuge for competition without limits. (p. 392) To others, it's a hive of
luxury and decadence, a plaything of the rich, the product of fabulously wealthy men and women who had been born in
the wrong era and yearned for the days of the gladiator and the Coliseum. (p.
239) Some view it as a chance to mean something, to avoid dying in some little duplex without anybody giving a good
goddamn." (p. 500) And, to others, it has the challenge of the first
of those, the significance of the second, and the height of the third. It's a
return to the days when whole nations,
entire races of people, pinned their hopes and futures on individual warriors.
Whole wars were won and lost on the outcome of a single battle between heroes.
Entire countries were moved. Empires rose and fell. (p. 475)

Unfortunately,
the Tournament's actualities are just as hard to pin down as its purpose. We
hear that no one on earth was out of
their [the Tournament's] reach (p. 443). But that doesn't seem to make sense. Who and what is
this Tournament? For an all powerful organization, one has to wonder why they
seem to have only a single worthwhile courier and why, for all the mentions of
their security forces, they're unable to control their players in any way. More
important than the makeup, though, is the question of secrecy. It makes
absolutely no sense that the Tournament wouldn't be found in about three days. Why?
Because its fights are in broad daylight. In hotels and streets, subways and
highways, and worse still. Because its battlegrounds are packed with civilians,
and because the organization seems wholly incapable of containing any amount of
information at all. Admittedly, the ferocity of the round that we see is
constantly remarked upon. The Tournament is growing more visceral, harder to
contain. It's turning into a war (p.
297). But that doesn't quite explain it. The players marked as psychotic aren't
the only ones that are careless. Even those that seem comparatively sane have
no problem with logic like: If the madmen
of Black can destroy a dance club with impunity, then we can certainly make a
bit of a stir on a runway. (p. 263) Positing no greater media or security
presence at an airport than at a dance club is simply mind boggling in our post
9/11 world. Besides which, I just want to point out that any organization so
focused on secrecy should avoid making a uniform for itself, let alone
something like dark jumpsuits emblazoned
with a white letter T. (p. 464) Real inconspicuous, guys.

We first
learn of the Tournament from Frank Youngsmith, an everyman and a nobody, an
investigator of insurance claims. In the novel's first third, he follows the
oddities in a case, stumbles across something that doesn't seem possible, is
warned away, and then seems to disappear altogether. His neighbor enters his
apartment and finds him gone, the place searched. At the end of the book, a
Tournament official tells him that he somehow
managed to find and make public more about our work than anyone in the history
of our organization. (p. 498) How he did that sounds like an interesting
story, right? Maybe even one you'd like to read a book about? Well, Blue Fall is not that book. I don't
mean, mind you, that Frank's story is badly told here. I simply mean that it's
not here. At all. Frank vanishes entirely from the book for hundreds of pages,
and everything from just before his quest's beginnings to its conclusion is
entirely absent, an omission as striking as if every third chapter had simply
been cut from the novel.

For the characters who are actually present, characterization
here is of two halves. During the actual matches, things are too fast moving
for in depth portraiture, but Griffith successfully throws in details,
emotions, and dialogue to give us vivid, larger than life players that are, in
their own ways, flawed. Unfortunately, Griffith seeks to broaden his characters
beyond their sport. Of course,
I'm not saying that characterization beyond the boundaries of plot is a bad
thing. But it doesn't work here, because the entirety of the novel's plot is
within the Tournament's framework, leaving the rest of the burden of characterization
to chapter long backstory-discharging info dumps that cover the players' lives
before they were recruited. Griffith's writing is compelling enough to prevent
these from growing truly boring, but they never grow interesting, either, and
our real questions (why are these seeming nobodies chosen for the Tournament
rather than, say, Special Forces officers?) remain unanswered. These flashback
chapters don't add much in the novel's early stages, when the characters are
first getting introduced, but the two or so that follow the Tournament's
commencing are annoyingly intrusive breaks in the action.

So, okay.
We're a fair few paragraphs into this review, and I've been pretty hard on Blue Fall. But it has a redeeming
feature, and it's a pretty big one: Blue
Fall is a damn fun book. Once it gets going, Blue Fall starts picking up momentum and never stops. Before long,
it's a speeding vehicle filled with gunfights, bravery, and set pieces that can
be best summed up as awesome tumbling about in the backseat. Alright, that metaphor kind of crashed and
burned. Nonetheless, watching the Tournament unfold in all its mayhem is
glorious.

Griffith's writing is always clear and capable of some very good
lines (In the interims between dinners,
time seemed to physically beat upon him. (p. 246)), but it's in battle that
it gets great. Firing off
multiple match ups at once allows Griffith to flip between them fast enough to keep
the tension sky high up for chapters on end. More impressive still is how, in a
novel with numerous teams and even more numerous players, Griffith keeps it all
from blending together into gunfighter stew. No matter how many fights are
going on at the moment, and no matter how many different tactics are about to
succeed or blow up with explosive glory, it's always perfectly clear where each
team member is and what their goals are. Furthermore, those set pieces I was
just talking about aren't just window dressing. Players successfully and not so
successfully make use of every part of their environment, giving us scenes like
deafening gunfire mingling with still louder music in a dance club and traffic
jam-trapped motorists being tricked into becoming distractions by the players. Like I said
before, I have no idea how even one of these messes could ever be hushed up,
but their creation's a joy to witness.

Blue Fall is dedicated to anybody who's
"been known to open up a book simply to escape," and what a nice
escape it is. While elements of Griffith's world building don't seem wholly
plausible, and while the pacing of the exposition can be clumsy, Blue Fall is still a powerful read, one
propelled forward by the strength of the combat at its center. Despite my
issues and reservations, I will be reading the next volume in the Tournament
series.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

If only Buffy had stayed dead. When she fell at the fifth season's close, the show had three absolutely excellent seasons (the aforementioned five as well as its second and third) under its belt and had established itself as a master of humor, drama, and horror. Then came season six, a mixture of poorly executed trauma and failed farce. Looking back, even that utter wasting of great characters and potential – an exploding outward in a thousand unfocused and irrelevant directions instead of a cohesive arc – would have been a preferable ending place. That's not to say that season seven imitates its predecessors faults, mind you. No, this show does get back on what might, from a distance, look like the right track. It's Buffy against the forces of darkness again, everything tied into one character-trying and plot-twisting arc. Only, when we weren't looking, the once-right track eroded, fell to pieces, and – much as this metaphor's starting to go off the rails – lost just about everything that once made it worthy. What's left is po-faced, embarrassingly grandiose, undercutting of everything that has gone before, and jam packed with enough new characters to staff an entire network's worth of awful spinoffs.

Let's start
with the characters. Not the main characters, mind you. Oh no. Remember when
the show was actually about the people on the box art? When they had focused
arcs that interacted with each other, that grew and changed? When we could watch
their growth and know them with all the clarity we'd have had if they'd
existed? We've left all of that far behind. Of course, this isn't the first
batch of new characters we've had. By this point, Buffy'd been going on for a
damn fair while, and new blood was always a part of keeping things fresh. But
it's not that new people are introduced here, and it's not that they don't
work. Some do. D.B. Woodside, for instance, is quite enjoyable as the school's
principal, and freelance vampire hunter, Robin Wood. The problem is that
there's nothing but new faces here. An onslaught of them. Literally dozens of
the bastards, flooding the set in utterly uncharacterized hordes until Buffy's
living room is so packed the camera needs to pan for whole seconds to show all
of the nameless faces. Before long, it starts to seem that the writers have wholly
forgotten how to make us care about characters and are just hoping to hide that
fact with sheer numbers. It doesn't work. By the end, I was looking on Andrew
(the season's surviving member of the Trio/Three Douchebags in a Van that so
marred the sixth) as an old friend in comparison to everyone around him.

Seriously.

So who are all these people? Potential Slayers, of course. It turns out that
the slayers are all part of one bloodline, and we learn that the Watchers' were
the ones that kept track of them and trained them so that they would be ready,
if they were called up. (Of course, Buffy received no such pre-Slayerhood
training, but we've bigger fish to fry at the moment than one little retcon.) Now,
the First Evil is hunting them, and it's up to Buffy to collect, protect, and train
them. So that's what she does. Before long, her house starts to resemble – and
then just outright become – less generic slice of suburbia and more a refugee shelter. As for the
potentials themselves, there are so many that there's no time at all for the
writers to distinguish them, let alone make us care about them. As a result,
they range from faceless to obnoxious, and they never amount to anything until
the final (regrettable) episode. In the meantime, though, we are shown them
striving to better themselves (they fail) and, occasionally, succumbing to
their foes and dying. Surprisingly, the perishing of unnamed, uncharacterized
clutter fails to provoke tears.

Only two
characters in all of this actually manage arcs, and the main one is, obviously,
Buffy's. Arc, though, might be the wrong word. It implies continuous change, moving
towards a climax and a new being. That's not quite accurate. Buffy has one
jarring shift near the beginning, and then she trudges along, constantly
pointing at the aforementioned change in case we missed it, until the show's
end. Here, Buffy must go from fighter to leader. She does this by making
speeches. Endless, endless, fucking endless
speeches. For entire stretches, she'll make one an episode. They're awful, so
self consciously inspirational that you want to cover your ears from the
embarrassment. To give just one glimpse of them:

I'm beyond tired. I'm beyond scared. I'm
standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole. And it'll
choke on me. We're not ready? They're not ready. They think we're gonna wait
for the end to come, like we always do. I'm done waiting. They want an
apocalypse? Oh, we'll give 'em one. Anyone else who wants to run, do it now.
'Cause we just became an army. We just declared war. From now on, we won't just
face our worst fears, we will seek them out. We will find them, and cut out
their hearts one by one, until The First shows itself for what it really is.
And I'll kill it myself. There is only one thing on this earth more powerful
than evil, and that's us. Any questions?

That's from Bring
on the Night. Lest you think it a climactic moment, it's the first of the
just-discussed many, the season's veritable hordes of speeches, and it's far
from the last time that Buffy will decide to take the fight to the enemy and then
promptly not do anything until the next speech.

Spike... is actually still awesome.

Then there's
Spike. His arc here works. Amazing, I know. It is, I think, the only complete storyline
to do so. Spike, soul in hand, is tormented by what he's done. In his
vulnerable state, the First Evil comes to him and vies for control of his soul
and purpose. It comes to a head in Lies My Parents Told Me, where Giles and
Wood decide that Spike is too dangerous to their team and attempt to slay him
and where Spike, as he's beaten by Wood, comes to terms with his vampirism and
what he's done. The only blemish on the whole thing is that it's such a small
part of the season's overall time and that its buildup, execution, and
aftermath are all but lost amidst every(regrettable)thing else. Anya's return
to humanity might have managed to reach some of Spike's heights, but suffers
far more from its lack of screen time and is wholly submerged by dreck before
long.

The pacing
of season seven is the worst pacing Buffy's ever had. The levity's almost
wholly gone now, replaced with a failed sense of impending doom that just
translates into endless brooding. Characters mope, motivate themselves, head
out on some ill defined venture with no clear goal, fail, and proceed to mope
once more. There's no sense of progress at all, not from Buffy's side and not
from her foe's. There's no relief from this at all, because the side stories
vanish as we progress. Then again, considering how poor efforts like Him are
early in the season, that may be for the best.

Well doesn't this look like an interesting villain.

The enemy
causing all of this, our final big bad, is the First Evil, the being of evil
incarnate that we first met in season three. Now, the First Evil is incorporeal.
That might, you may be thinking, pose a problem. It does. The writers get
around this in two ways. First, through the introduction of avatar type
characters. In the first half, we get the ubervamp (no, seriously). It's a
vampire with far more strength and almost none of the vampire's traditional
weaknesses. It also can't speak and, so, has no personality to speak of; it
moves about the screen with roughly the same force of character that a
scurrying raccoon, inadvertently given super strength, might have. Then, after
a brief stint with Spike, it settles on Caleb,
played by Nathan Fillion. Now, I love Nathan Fillion. Firefly's Mal Reynolds is likely my
favorite character in television. But Caleb is a failure, just another villain
who trudges about, doesn't properly react to punches, and hits really, really
hard. He also spouts nonsensical pseudo-religious mush. Fascinating. Sadly,
things are even less interesting when the First Evil chooses to act with its own untouchable charms. As we see in Conversations with Dead People, it talks to
people. Before long, they're all aware that it's
evil incarnate they're speaking with. They still listen. Apparently, knowing
that it's the embodiment of everything you've ever strove against isn't reason
enough to disregard its advice. Needless to say, mayhem ensues. Needless to say,
it's stupid.

To show how utterly
worthless this season is as a conclusion, though, we must really look closer at
the finale. The last two episodes – End of Days and Chosen – are pitch perfect
examples of irredeemable, inexcusable failure. As one of my friends and fellow
viewers noted, the climaxes in these two episodes somehow manage to combine
being contrived and being totally flat. No matter how much the writers cheat in
the set up, and no matter how much we might grit our teeth and go along with
it, they still can't bring off a good finish.

We begin
with Buffy's acquisition of the Scythe, a mythical battle axe that, we later
learn, she wrests from Caleb in a bitter struggle. I say "later
learn," even though we see the scene in real time, because there's no
struggle at all. She just picks it up. It seems, judging by conversations to
come, that it was supposed to be a sword in the stone moment, but that's just
about exactly the thing that could
use some prior set up. Anyway. Buffy gets the Scythe, which looks, at best,
like it was from some faux-Medieval video game and, at worst, like it's from
Rock Band.

Buffy goes off to research her new toy. Luckily, it's the fifth result on the
first website that is tried. She tracks down a mysterious woman to learn more about
it. This woman is a pagan, in an Egyptian style tomb, in California. Not a
Native American, though, we're told. Alright then. Get out of the way, history,
and let's proceed. The woman gives a
long speech. Once she's done, Caleb (who was, evidently, standing directly
behind her without her commenting and, maybe, hiding in her dress to stay out
of frame) snaps her neck. He and Buffy fight and, as Buffy almost dies, Angel
steps in to save her. He then stands off to the side while she almost dies.
When Caleb finally falls, Buffy and Angel embrace and kiss. Spike, who was
evidently watching from the corner and decided to not intervene as Buffy fought
for her life, grimaces. Angel then goes home, but not before dispensing a magical amulet. Fatuus ex machina.

Most of
that, mind you, is about five minutes, and I'll spare you a blow by blow of the
scene's rest. After all, we've a climax to cover! Once the final episode's first half (consisting
entirely of brooding and a planning scene we're so artfully kept away from) is
over, we get to the big finish. Buffy, the rest of the cast, and the horde of
faceless, obnoxious potential Slayers enter the Hellmouth to have a throw down
with the First Evil and defeat its army of ubervamps before they can invade
Helm's Deep. Their victory comes from two avenues. First, Willow uses the power
of the Scythe to make every woman who might become a slayer a slayer right then
and there. This may have been a very good idea. It might have been a powerful
closer, a last statement about the empowerment of women in a show that dealt so
heavily with such scenes. Completely lacking set up as it is, it doesn't quite
make it, to say the very least.

Hey, the amulet that random stranger
gave me with no explanation twenty minutes ago
turned out to save the day!
Well isn't that just dandy!

That's
nothing at all, though, compared to the source of their ultimate victory. That
amulet that Angel brought, less than an hour ago? It saves the day. When Spike
wears it into the Hellmouth, it fills with light, destroys the ubervamps, and
saves the world. I'm not leaving out a step, mind you. None of this is set up.
At all. In any way. We get no inclination of what the amulet does before it
does it. It plays no role in the character's plans. It seems like it would have
done the same thing if worn by an invading gerbil. It is a deus ex machina of
monolithic proportions, an embodiment of the ultimate failure of every writer
that so much as added a comma to the show's script. It is the apotheosis of pathetic writing.

The plot's
resolution is ridiculous, and don't be fooled into thinking that the characters
save it. They don't even try. In terms of their physicality, there's the slight
question of why Buffy, mortally stabbed moments before, not only proceeds to
soldier on but totally forgets about her injury. Really, though, that's small beans compared to what happens inside the characters' heads. One can only assume that
a side effect of entering the Hellmouth was a complete lobotomy, an end to all
personality and emotion. It's the only possible assumption for Xander's only
comment upon Anya's death to be, "That's my girl," said with a smile
on his face. Lucky we get to avoid an actual display of emotion at the closing, right?

Buffy the
Vampire Slayer started rocky, grew great, crashed and bombed with season six,
and then seems to have fallen far enough to tunnel through the earth's core
with this last miserable offering. The characters are gone, drowned in a
faceless tide. The plot is tired and overwrought. The world is saved by an
unforeshadowed magical amulet. The season is rubbish. If only Buffy had stayed
dead.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to his
fantastic, Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. But unlike most prequels, A Deepness in the
Sky doesn't blandly putter about the backdrop or spend its time retconning
with sledgehammer subtlety. Though we are exploring Pham Nuwen's history, we're
doing so in a fashion far enough removed from the earlier (/chronologically
later) novel that A Deepness in the Sky has
space to become its own story. In fact, the closest connection between the two
is thematic, with A Deepness in the Sky presenting
a claustrophobic counterpoint to the mind-boggling expanses of its predecessor.

A Deepness in the Sky is a book of
humanity constrained. By the time of its occurrence, humankind has grown far
beyond what we can now imagine, but true greatness – the ends of misery and
suffering, the permanence of civilization and justice – remain out of reach,
nothing more than impossibilities and "Failed Dreams" (p. 323). We've
learned much through all these thousands of future years, but mainly we've learned of limits (p. 770). Unable to go beyond the speed of
light, no culture can survive between planets and systems, and so planetary civilizations rise and fall. At
the height they're wonderful things, but there is so much darkness. (p.
770) No matter how great a civilization may grow, it cannot be eternal. A Fire Upon the Deep showed a path of
potential and nigh endless ascension, of mobility and transcendence if only one
could overcome the dangers. A Deepness in
the Sky, taking place entirely within what that other novel would call the
Slow Zone, has the rises and falls without the possibility of growth or
apotheosis. It shows humanity endlessly struggling against the "wheel of
time" (323) and humanity being endlessly broken upon it.

It is this
inevitability that the outsider, planet-born Pham Nuwen strives against. He
dreams of a single Humankind, where
justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all
of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned. (pp. 556-7) Motivated
by that dream, Nuwen approaches the disparate Qeng Ho trading culture and tries
to meld them into a unifying force. But his dreams prove impossible. Mere
organization is not enough; humankind is fundamentally outmatched by time and space.

Outmatched within
its own boundaries, that is, for the novel's main action takes place far past
the establishment of this cycle of rises and falls, takes place as humankind
reaches something utterly alien: the On/Off star (which emits no heat at all
for 215 of every 250 years) and, on the one planet that orbits it, the Spiders,
a nonhuman technological race. Then there's the fact that the Qeng Ho expedition
to this star is not the only one. The Emergents have also arrived, a disparate human
civilization that possesses its own dark secrets and strengths.

After their
so ominous introduction, it's not that surprising when the Emergents prove
villainous and betray the Qeng Ho they'd pretended to coexist with. The Qeng Ho
expedition must not only struggle to survive under the Emergent's tyranny but
also, in Pham Nuwen's case, struggle to find a way to finally overcome the
necessity of these endless and unwinnable life and death struggles. Nuwen,
though, is not the only one striving.

Nuwen's counterpart
in the space borne part of the story is Tomas Nau, the Emergent's leader, who has
reached his own solution with the aid of Focus, an Emergent science that allows
once-free individuals to be turned into hyper efficient slaves. This
transcendence through cruelty is efficient, allowing not only short term
miracles but also the long term coordination and stability that would be needed
to truly enact the kind of justice and greatness throughout space that Nuwen
envisions. But, though he's initially drawn to use of the Focused, Nuwen eventually
realizes that the cost is too high and that any utopia created with such
inhumanity at its center is not worthy of its own immortality.

The far
opposite of Nau's practicality only approach might be Sherkaner Underhill's.
Sherkaner's one of the sentient spider-like creatures that the whole story
revolves around, but his role isn't that of a prize passively sitting by while
his betters fight over him. No, Sherkaner's busy with his mad ideas, playing
the role of the resident and eccentric mad genius, spouting out a thousand flights
of brilliancy and fancy a second and then moving on before they're all the way
out of his mouth, a tireless flirting around what might just be possible
without ever letting the difficulties of reality in, a job that falls those
around him to face in order to make use of his mind.

It is,
eventually, something like Sherkaner's method that triumphs. No matter how well
meaning or ruthless we are, Vinge shows us that we alone are not enough to
triumph over time, fate, and inevitability. No, for that we need technology and
an endless search for what is possible. In the end, the On/Off star doesn't give
Pham Nuwen the answers, but it does show him that answers are not impossible,
and, as readers of A Fire Upon the Deep
know, that is eventually enough to get him (and all of us?) the rest of the
way. As Nuwen himself puts it, "We've
finally found something from outside
all our limits. It's a tiny glimpse, shreds and drags of brightest glory."
(p. 770)

Tying into
all this is actually the question of classification. I've seen A Deepness in the Sky often called Hard
Science Fiction. That's, well, rather bizarre. Let me remind you, oh venerable
and impossible to pin down internet classifiers, that this is a novel that
contains a star that turns itself off every once in a while and genuine
antigravity, to name just the two most obvious case-breakers. My point here
goes beyond simple quibbling with genres, though. A Deepness in the Sky is not a work grounded in the current trends
of scientific thought, and one could go so far as to say that that's the entire
point of it. This is not a novel about what we know, but rather about what we
don't know, and Vinge is damn careful throughout to divorce it from the strict
boundaries of 21st century plausibility. As such, and making full
use of Clarke's third law and all that goes with it, Vinge makes frequent references
to the "magic" of such incomprehensible things things, be they the
On/Off star (p. 197), the previous and inconceivably advanced prior dwellers on
Arachna (p. 254), or even Focus technology (p. 294). There's even a mention of
the Weird (which, though this is certainly not Horror in either its methods or
its mindset, is a rather related field) in the form of a reference to your typical Cthulhonic horror (p. 297).

But, my
thousand plus word reveling in Vinge's fascinating thematic arc now past,
there's also a story here, and, though I've no doubt done my inadvertent best
to convince you otherwise with all my blathering, it's not a pretentious one at
all. At its best, it's fantastic. Vinge plots like a hunting hound given
flight, free to go anywhere he can imagine and downright damned if he won't
explore ever interesting nook, cranny, and consequence of what he's dreamed up.
But there are flaws, too, and some are, alas, quite grievous. In my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I said that "Vinge’s
characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas"and that "once just about all’s
explained and understood […] a bit of the excitement leaves the affair." In
A Deepness in the Sky, we, alas,
reach that point far sooner, a likely result of the novel being far more
stationary, with much less stage space, and so running out of new and totally
out there sights to throw at us far sooner. Once that point's reached, and with
the exception of Pham Nuwen's flashbacks, things are up to the plotting and the
characters. And things don't go nearly as well.

Once its
fantastic opening is done, and once we've settled into its middle section, A Deepness in the Sky proceeds to trudge
along for a truly incredible amount of time. There is a climax coming, of
course, but we know roughly what shape it'll take from a quarter or a third of
the way through, and the vast majority of the character's actions aren't so
much bringing it about as they are talking about what they'll do when it hits
them of its own volition. This idle and often almost eventless pacing is highlighted
by the timescale. Years and years pass over the novel's course, which just
seems to turn the character's profitless determination and motionless
enthusiasm into, well, nothing at all. Then there's the bewildering way that so
many of the novel's intermediate game changers happen entirely off screen and
are only alluded to in passing. This is bad aboard the ships, where we spend
the majority of our time, but is far worse on the Spiders' world of Arachna,
where gaps and skips leave the villain developing somewhere totally out of view
and inconsequential feeling and, because of it, undefined by anything but
uninteresting blanket statements like Whatever
was evil, Pedure was very good at it. (p. 583)

Characters
in general prove, if not a problem, not exactly a strength. Like in A Fire Upon the Deep, they're wholly
ruled by the forces around them, but here there are long periods where none of
those forces are particularly evident and we're left with not much but the
characters themselves sitting around. Vinge is decent at creating believable
and realistic individuals, but, whether by design or by virtue of falling short,
the reader never comes to grow close to any of them. This works for characters
like Pham Nuwen and Sherkaner Underhill, both of which are too much larger than
life and to scheming to serve as easy points of reader identification, but it
does end up leaving the work without any real emotional center, with a bunch of
characters that make certainly well realized minor characters but none that the
reader ever truly lives through.

Despite
these flaws, though, A Deepness in the
Sky is a stunning and expansive read. It's not quite as breathtaking or simply
excellent as its predecessor, but it still does show off Vinge's skill and
imagination, still stretches out and smashes (delightful!) holes in your
imagination. Though A Fire Upon the Deep
and A Deepness in the Sky are
separate enough to be read individually, their combined effect shows both the
possibilities for greatness and for disaster in the author's vision of the
future, and each is a daring and powerful work of Science Fiction. Put in order, the two show a probable arc for technology's progress. Most of this novel is a seemingly endless stagnation that follows that technology's brief arrival, but just because the answers are hard to find does not mean that they are not there, and Vinge seems sure that technology will eventually able us to succeed at our most fundamental goals.

...Who?

I spend my free time reading and writing. In addition to assorted other content, I'll be posting a book review every Tuesday. I have also published a fair few stories, a complete list of which can be found here. If you want to get in contact with me for any reason, feel free to email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.